KYIV: On the seventh day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr  Zelenskyy on Wednesday said almost 6,000 Russians have been in 6 days of the war. Reuters quoted Zelenskiy as saying even as the Russian airborne troops landed in Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, which is under intense shelling for the past few days. 


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The city mayor said at least 21 people were killed and 112 wounded in shelling in the last 24 hours. Earlier in the day, US President Joe Biden vowed to make Vladimir Putin “pay a price” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in his first State of the Union address. 


Announcing that the US is banning Russia from its airspace, Biden said the Russian president met with “a wall of strength” in Ukraine. Biden’s comments come as Russian forces escalated their attacks on crowded urban areas Tuesday, bombarding the central square in Ukraine’s second-biggest city and Kyiv’s main TV tower.


Despite pressure and sanctions, Russia said that it will pursue the Ukraine offensive until 'all goals' are achieved, the defence minister was quoted by AFP.


Russian forces escalated their attacks on crowded urban areas Tuesday, bombarding the central square in Ukraine's second-biggest city and Kyiv's main TV tower in what the country's President called a blatant campaign of terror. "Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget," President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed after the bloodshed on the square in Kharkiv. 


Meanwhile, a 40-mile convoy of hundreds of Russian tanks and other vehicles advanced slowly on Kyiv, the capital city of nearly 3 million people, in what the West feared was a bid by Russian President Vladimir Putin to topple the government and install a Kremlin-friendly regime.


The invading forces also pressed their assault on other towns and cities, including the strategic ports of Odesa and Mariupol in the south. Day 6 of the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II found Russia increasingly isolated, beset by the sanctions that have thrown its economy into turmoil and left the country practically friendless, apart from a few nations like China, Belarus and North Korea.


As the fighting in Ukraine raged, the death toll remained unclear. One senior Western intelligence official estimated that more than 5,000 Russian soldiers had been captured or killed. Ukraine gave no overall estimate of troop losses.


The UN human rights office said it has recorded 136 civilian deaths. The real toll is believed to be far higher. Britain's Defence Ministry said it had seen an increase in Russian air and artillery strikes on populated urban areas over the past two days.


It also said three cities -  Kharkiv, Kherson and Mariupol -  were encircled by Russian forces. Many military experts worry that Russia may be shifting tactics. Moscow's strategy in Chechnya and Syria was to use artillery and air bombardments to pulverize cities and crush fighters' resolve.


Ukrainian authorities said five people were killed in the attack on the TV tower, which is a couple of miles from central Kyiv and a short walk from numerous apartment buildings. A TV control room and power substation were hit, and at least some Ukrainian channels briefly stopped broadcasting, officials said.


The bombing came after Russia announced it would target transmission facilities used by Ukraine's intelligence agency. It urged people living near such places to leave their homes. Zelenskyy's office also reported a powerful missile attack on the site of the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial, near the tower.


A spokesman for the memorial said a Jewish cemetery at the site, where Nazi occupiers killed more than 33,000 Jews over two days in 1941, was damaged, but the extent would not be clear until daylight. In Kharkiv, with a population of about 1.5 million, at least six people were killed when the region's Soviet-era administrative building on Freedom Square was hit with what was believed to be a missile.


The Slovenian Foreign Ministry said its consulate in Kharkiv, located in another large building on the square, was destroyed in the attack. The entrance to the consulate was between a jewellery store and a bank.


The attack on Freedom Square, Ukraine's largest plaza, and the nucleus of public life in the city ? was seen by many Ukrainians as brazen evidence that the Russian invasion wasn't just about hitting military targets but also about breaking their spirit.


The bombardment blew out windows and walls of buildings that ring the massive square, which was piled high with debris and dust. Inside one building, chunks of plaster were scattered, and doors, ripped from their hinges, lay across hallways.


Zelenskyy pronounced the attack on the square "frank, undisguised terror'' and a war crime. This is state terrorism of the Russian Federation, he said. In an emotional appeal to the European Parliament later, Zelenskyy said, ''We are fighting also to be equal members of Europe. I believe that today we are showing everybody that is what we are."


Another Russian airstrike hit a residential area near a hospital in the city of Zhytomyr, Mayor Serih Sukhomlin said in a Facebook video. Ukrainians have so far used whatever they had to try to stop the Russian advance. On a highway between Odesa and Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, residents piled tractor tires filled with sand and topped with sandbags to block convoys. 


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